


blood bank

by inkspl0tches



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Cancer Arc, F/M, Romance, Vignette, this is weird sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-01
Updated: 2015-02-01
Packaged: 2018-03-10 01:21:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3271508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkspl0tches/pseuds/inkspl0tches
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In fairy tales he would be with her when it happened and she would fall into nothing as she had fallen into everything: breathless and terrified and holding his hand. But their reality was bitter and merciless even when it was fantastic, terrible even when it was divine. And the God that had given her cancer was not a God that would allow him to be at her side. She knows some things. She knows this. </p><p>// cancer arc //</p>
            </blockquote>





	blood bank

__

that secret that you knew but don't know how to tell  
it fucks with your honor and it teases your head  
but you know that it's good girl  
'cause its running you with red

blood bank // bon iver

__

She counts down from ten before she calls him. Six, five, four. She never called him this late. He always called her. Three, two, one. She reaches for the phone. Blastoff. Rockets firing off into the unexplored, thrown like spears into the uncharted sea of space. The Challenger blew up moments after take off. Her nose is dripping blood onto her clean white sheets. The phone rings three times.

She stopped wearing satin pajamas a few months ago after she’d had to bleach the collar of her favorite pair. She’d been very pragmatic about it, folding and boxing them away into the back of her closet. She'd pursed her lips and wrote “Pajamas” on it for later, just in case, just for safety's sake. Her handwriting was stiff and neat as ever. She’d thought of her mother rooting through the closet, her warm hands unfolding the silk tops. She’d maybe cried.

She wipes her nose on her grey t-shirt as she waits for him to answer the phone.

“Scully?” He doesn’t sound like he was sleeping. She can hear the edge of panic in his voice.

“Yeah, it’s me. How’d you know?” She sniffs and tries to smile because she knows he can hear it. She can almost see him settle down on his couch a little. This isn’t it. She’s not going anywhere tonight.

“Just a hunch.”

“Mmhm.”

“Can’t sleep?”

“No.”

“Did you try counting sheep?”

“Yes.”

“Tea? Isn’t that supposed to help?”

“Tried that.”

“So I’m your last resort, huh?”

“At the very least I thought you could bore me into slumber.”

He laughs and they are quiet for a while. She sniffs again. She’s almost out of Kleenex.

“Scully?” He says quietly. He’s asking if she’s alright.

“Mulder.”

“What...what do you want me to do?”

They are never quite talking about what they are talking about. She wonders if his hands feel hollow from grasping at straws, if the space between his fingers stretches every time the truth slips through them. She twists the phone cord around her pinky until she feels nothing. She used to twirl the cord as a teen talking to her boyfriend. This is not the same.

“Come pick me up.”

“What?”

“I just. I want to drive around a while.”

He hangs up.

##

He’s been buying her candy bars at the vending machine lately. Dropping Hershey’s and Snickers on her desk during the long, languid hours of the afternoon.

“You should eat more,” he says.

Her cheeks are hollowed out, she knows. She looks atrophied in black so she’s started wearing blues. It highlights the circles under her eyes, the thinness of her shadow. In her sophomore year biology class they'd dressed up the skeleton in the corner for Halloween, a red dress, a yellow scarf. It's bones had still been visible underneath.

He looks at her like she’s a frail thing, sharp edges and easily breakable bones. She knows he’d always thought she was beautiful. Does death become her?

She doesn’t ask.

##

It’s snowing and she waits for him on the street outside her apartment. The streetlight warms a halo of snow around her head and when he pulls up next to her she looks like she’s glowing.

“Fuck, Scully,” he says, getting out of the car and putting an arm around her. He practically carries her into the passenger seat and she bites her lip so she doesn’t snap at him. “It’s freezing. I would have come upstairs.”

“I’m not cold,” she says and she isn't. Sometimes she shakes when he can’t see her. Fingers trembling over delicate incisions, hands in pockets, coat buttoned to the top. Cold is autopsies and cadavers and iodine. Cold is the manifest content of dreams where she can't breathe, she can't breathe, she can't breath and her blood is ice not fire. Cold is red on the bathroom tile and the shower turned up so hot she can't feel it burn. She is ice, she is numb, she is crystallized, but she is not cold.

He glances her out of the corner of his eye when she settles into the seat beside him and cranks the heater. He doesn't turn on the radio. She watches the glove compartment and wonders if she opened it how many packets of tissues would float down. Afterwards (Later, When It Happens, When She Dies. Capital letters are official. Her death will be an affair.) will he still keep extras in his jacket pocket?

It’s so quiet she can hear him holding his breath and it takes her a moment to realize he’s listening for her breathing. Pausing to hear her inhale before he releases his breath. She wonders if she stopped if he would too and she knows the answer without wanting to. An icepick above her breastbone sends fault lines through her chest and she cracks. A strangled, gasping sob. She presses a finger to her lips.

“Mulder,” she says. “Mulder."

The snow on the road is flying at them, the headlights converging into a single line, striking a path through the DC darkness. He looks at her and she sees it, before he covers it with concern she sees it and she knows. It is red hot fury in his gaze and for a moment he thought he was losing her, had lost her, that it would end in the car at 2 a.m. in the snow and he was going to fight. He was going to strangle the metaphysical for taking her from him. She wonders if he keeps the gun by his bed loaded and who will he shoot first when he gets the call?

(and in fairy tales he would be with her when it happened and she would fall into nothing as she had fallen into everything with him: breathless and terrified and holding his hand. but their reality was bitter and merciless even when it was fantastic, terrible even when it was divine and the god that had given her cancer was not a god that would allow him to be at her side. she knows some things. she knows this.)

“I'm alive,” she says. "I'm alive."

He lets out the breath he's been holding.

"Of course," he says. "You're alive."

Outside snowflakes hit the ground and melt.

##

When they walk their dark coats merge together. They lean close without meaning to, as though they are struggling to hear each other, but really they aren't speaking, they aren't talking at all.

When they walk he keeps his fingertips over her spine and touches her elbow unconsciously. Once he grabbed her wrist to tell her something as she was walking away. Not hard, just circling his fingers over delicate bones. His thumb brushed over her veins, once, twice.

She bruises too easily. Purple watercolor on her hips and back. A garden of violets blooms on her thigh. There is a blue circle like a bracelet, a cuff around her radius from his hand. She discovers it in the shower, presses her lips to the mark. She is wasting, wasting away.

She thinks if he kissed her she would taste like copper.

##

He tells her about the snowflake fairy, about Samantha’s favorite cartoon as a child, about his mother’s tendency to overcook chicken every time they had guests. The way his father had yelled when he had brought home a stray dog. The first time he was ever drunk. He talks and he talks and he talks until she can’t hear every beat of her heart pound against her ribcage. Can’t hear the soundlessness of the wind outside and imagine an infinite nothing.

He says: Really, Scully, it was the ugliest dog you’ve ever seen. He thinks: I’m not going to let this happen to you.

He says: My mother used to read aloud from The Velveteen Rabbit every night. I hated it by the time I was six. Thinks: I love you, I love you, I love you.

She falls asleep against the window and her breathing fogs up the glass.

It’s just after three in the morning when he parks outside her apartment building. He goes around to her door and she is too light when he picks her up. She is too light, she is too pale, she sleeps too deeply. She is too much of everything, as always. Too much fight and fury and heat and brilliance. Too much for her hands to be so cold. She sleeps like she’s comfortable with the darkness behind her closed lids, like she is at peace. He wants to wake her up, but he doesn't. 

He sets her down on her couch and pulls a blanket up to her chin. When he kisses her it is just under her jaw. His lips over her pulse so he can feel the thrum of blood in her veins. Steady. 

He walks back to his car and leaves footprints in the snow. It’s too cold to melt now. The wind hums around his car, thrashing snow against the sides, the trees creak above him. A whole world in motion. An electricity in the air through ephemeral veins. The night breathes and her heart had beat under his lips.

Alive, alive, alive.

**Author's Note:**

> \-- listen to blood bank by bon iver while reading this. just do.  
> \-- this was inspired by a post aliens-scully made so she gets a ton of credit!


End file.
